


This Shaking Keeps Me Steady

by ophelietta



Category: xxxHoLic
Genre: F/M, Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-01
Updated: 2013-01-01
Packaged: 2017-11-23 04:15:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 655
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/617973
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ophelietta/pseuds/ophelietta
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>And this I know:</i><br/><i>What falls away is always, and is near.</i><br/>- Theodore Roethke </p><p><i>Some days he feels like he's breathing for the three of them.</i> A brief look at the Doumeki-side of "I Wake to Sleep."</p>
            </blockquote>





	This Shaking Keeps Me Steady

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [I Wake to Sleep (The Waking Slow Remix of Phantom Limb)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/409414) by [ophelietta](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ophelietta/pseuds/ophelietta). 
  * Inspired by [Sea Deep, Til Doomsday Morning](https://archiveofourown.org/works/139022) by [evil_whimsey](https://archiveofourown.org/users/evil_whimsey/pseuds/evil_whimsey). 



> This started out its life as a comment to evil_whimsey about the Doumeki side of "I Wake to Sleep" (specifically, how it could connect to Doumeki from "Sea Deep Til Doomsday Morning") and, like some unfinished chimera, meandered into its current form as a snippet of fic. It has also found another life as a podfic by the ever eloquent evil_whimsey.

She kept trying to say things without saying them, the angles in her smiles all wrong and her sentences curling up at the end like questions. Her hatred for herself shone clean and bright. She had always struck him as human - cursed, and deeply unhappy, but always human - and thought it was something in Watanuki, not in her, that made her glow, as if she was just reflecting borrowed light. But now he could see what made her divine: her capacity, or her gift, for finding new and complicated ways of suffering.    
  
She comes to him in the middle of the night, crazy-haired and shivering, showing up on the temple stairs like some kind of sad offering and all he can think through his sleepdrunk haze is that he's so blindingly _tired_. He hasn't been sleeping well (at all), unless dropping off during meditation counts, and even without the stupidity of sleep deprivation, Himawari's done something funny to his vision. Watanuki described the way she looked to him, black clouds writhing all around her but to Doumeki, she's stripped herself bare, exposing every ligament and muscle and vein. She catches at his sleeve and he's scared that if he lifts her fingers off, he'll feel her knuckle bones breaking in his hands.  
  
Watanuki needed explosions and shattering glass to drown out the noise of all the things he didn't want to hear; Himawari needed her beautiful lies, needed to say that _everything would be all right_ , as if speaking the words would make it so. But Doumeki had always been quiet, because he knew that words couldn't touch the truth; the truth was what remained true no matter what anybody said about it. His words could offer no comfort or consolation. There was nothing he could say.  
  
Some days he feels like he's breathing for the three of them, and that if he opens his mouth, the first words will be, _I give up_ , and in speaking for himself, he'll have spoken for all three.    
  
So he says nothing at all.  
  
~  
  
They sleep curled up against each other, close enough that he can feel her breath moving through her body and he can press his skin against her, willing the touch to offer the comfort that words are incapable of, and he thinks, _Is this enough? Can this ever be enough?_  
  
He wakes up to her kiss. Cold lips on his brow, a murmur. When she rolls away from him and pads out of his room, his ribs unlock and he can breathe again. These days, her eyes and her mouth are too much like Watanuki's; when she speaks, he tries to think of her words like music or like feathers, harmless and meaningless and just drifting past, instead of knives under the skin.  
  
She leaves for university but she doesn't really _leave_. When he's hauling out empty bottles to be recycled and sweeping away shards of porcelain so they don't get caught underfoot and trying not to think about how well he is now acquainted with the different shades of drying blood, he can hear a voice in his head that sounds like Himawari's, and that voice whispers, _The lucky one, remember that you are the lucky one_.  
  
His tongue always freezes in his mouth before he can scream at her about what all this is like, what all of this is _really like_ , because he has this awful feeling that even if she knew everything, it wouldn't alter her jealousy or her longing to take his place. She is truly cursed - not because those who love her are visited by catastrophe, but because none of that ever stops her from loving them back.  
  
 _~_  
  
In the summertime, she says, _I'm sorry_ , apologising for her own freedom, and his mind plays tricks on him: when he tries to remember the shape of her scars, he can only see the outline of chains on her back.


End file.
